Propelled by an early imaginative and prescient to assist others, Dr Abba Mallum tells Highlight about his roots in Borno State, about alternatives in Stellenbosch and Durban, and about his pioneering PhD in radiotherapy and oncology.
In Borno State, Nigeria, quickly after graduating from medical college Dr Abba Mallum handled a younger affected person whose unhappy plight would form his future. In Gamboru Ngala, on northeastern Nigeria’s border with Cameroon close to Lake Chad, Mallum paid the younger lady’s taxi fare to the College of Maiduguri Instructing Hospital – about 150 kilometres away – the place she was to have a breast lump eliminated. However poverty interrupted her pathway to care.
Mallum recounts: “In Nigeria, the healthcare sector is out of pocket. Many individuals can’t afford it. In order a service to the neighborhood that produced me, I used to be seeing sufferers without spending a dime. A younger girl in her twenties had a breast lump and I informed her she must go to the tertiary centre to have it eliminated. She stated they do not have transport cash. I keep in mind saying to her: ‘I am not supplying you with the cash in hand.’ As an alternative, I paid for the taxi and phoned a colleague and informed him: ‘There may be this affected person who’s coming, please are you able to assist them’.”
Eight months later, Mallum, then appointed as a resident physician at Maiduguri Instructing Hospital, noticed the younger lady once more, however she was barely recognisable.
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“The saddest half is… They had been taking me round, introducing the sufferers,” he remembers. “After which we handed a affected person they usually informed me, it is a girl with breast most cancers. She was saying to me: ‘Physician, I do know you’. So once we completed the rounds, I went again to her saying the place have you learnt me from? She stated: ‘You noticed me within the village. You stated if I do not take away this factor it might kill me.’ I stated to her however you had been speculated to be within the automobile. I paid for the automobile, what occurred? She stated: ‘After you left, my mum requested me is it painful? I informed her it wasn’t painful. We had not cooked for greater than three days and I’ve siblings. So instantly my mum informed the taxi man to maintain 5 or 10 p.c however to provide again the remainder of the cash. We went purchasing after which we had dinner. And now. This factor is killing me’.”
Tragically, her well being had deteriorated past treatment. Mallum remembers: “It was already foul-smelling as a result of when most cancers breaks via the pores and skin, bacterial an infection typically follows. It caught in my thoughts.”
Profession pivot to oncology
The incident saved him up into the early morning hours. Someplace previous midnight, he says it turned the pivot that steered his profession towards oncology. “My finest essential time of pondering is something after midnight, say 2-3 am,” he says. “I sat down and requested myself: who takes care of most cancers? Surprisingly, my area [north-eastern Nigeria, with nearly 22 million people at the time] we did not have one oncology unit. We did not have one radiation machine.”
Mallum provides that had the younger lady made the journey to Maiduguri Instructing Hospital, she would have been handled with surgical procedure. If further radiation remedy had been required, she would have undertaken a ten-hour journey westward to the Ahmadu Bello College Instructing Hospital in Zaria, which housed the one oncology unit in northern Nigeria, on the time.
“I realised as a health care provider that I wanted to contribute to this explicit a part of drugs due to this huge want,” he says. “That girl was the rationale for me to start out. The motivation comes from her; the dream it got here from her.”
“The mom of oncology in Africa”
He couldn’t concentrate on oncology in Nigeria due to restricted most cancers remedy infrastructure. “However then,” he says. “I used to be praying to be taken to challenges that want me. I used to be searching for alternatives and was very privileged to search out one in South Africa, at Stellenbosch College and Tygerberg Tutorial Hospital.”
He began his four-year Grasp of Drugs in radiation oncology at Stellenbosch College in 2014. Reflecting on his mentor, Professor Hannah Simonds, Tygerberg’s former head of scientific and radiation oncology, he beams: “Personally, I see her because the mom of oncology in Africa.”
Mallum is talking to Highlight in Durban, inside a small workplace adjoining the radiation and oncology centre at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, the place he’s a consulting oncologist. Earlier, strolling alongside a hall, Mallum paused to talk with a affected person; bending his strong body over the person who appeared comparatively frail. “Sawubona,” Mallum stated to the person. “I shall be with you quickly, the remainder of the group is there.”
The hospital was the analysis web site of Mallum’s PhD on the College of KwaZulu-Natal, titled: “Comparative Evaluation of Hypofractionated Versus Typical Radiotherapy for Breast, Cervical, and Prostate Most cancers in an African Setting: A Combined-Strategies Examine at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital.”
A PhD first
This, says Mallum, could be the primary PhD dissertation in radiotherapy and oncology accomplished in South Africa. “I did it due to my curiosity and eager to get depth of data about this matter. And alongside the way in which, I got here to grasp, I’m the one candidate!”
Professor Mariza Vorster, head of nuclear drugs on the College of KwaZulu-Natal and Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital, who co-supervised Mallum’s thesis, tells Highlight his PhD was the primary in radiotherapy and oncology on the college, and “to the most effective of our information, the primary on this self-discipline in South Africa”.
Mallum explains that his analysis checked out whether or not shorter programs of radiotherapy (referred to as hypofractionation) – which is extensively utilized in high-income nations – will be safely applied in sub-Saharan Africa, the place sufferers might have further well being burdens like HIV.
Most cancers sufferers in Africa face among the hardest odds on the planet, however the ground-breaking analysis of Dr Abba Aji Mallum, who’s UKZN’s first PhD graduate in Radiotherapy and Oncology, affords renewed hope for enhancing most cancers care throughout the continent https://t.co/8xg4kKtQF0 pic.twitter.com/D9mRrbx9lm
— UKZN’s CHS (@UKZNCHS) September 23, 2025
His analysis discovered that for prostate, breast and cervical most cancers sufferers, hypofractionated remedy was simply as efficient as standard radiotherapy, with no vital distinction in survival outcomes. For instance, breast most cancers sufferers handled with hypofractionated radiotherapy had comparable five-year survival charges to these receiving standard remedy – however at almost half the price.
He has printed numerous papers on the difficulty, together with within the journal Frontiers in Oncology in 2025. In it he writes: “Hypofractionation has potential advantages for most cancers sufferers in low-income nations by decreasing remedy period and useful resource calls for. Nevertheless, few research have examined the potential for larger toxicity because of the elevated radiation dose per session, significantly in sufferers with present well being burdens like HIV.”
The examine confirmed that hypofractionated radiotherapy delivered comparable scientific outcomes to standard radiation remedy in sufferers with cervical most cancers, with a remedy time of 35 days as a substitute of 62. “So that’s what motivated me,” he says. “There are a variety of implications: much less ready time earlier than remedy, much less journeys to the hospital, the affected person is lacking much less work, much less challenges that the household are dealing with when it comes to stress.”
Durban: challenges and options – “most cancers would not sleep”
His large ardour, Mallum tells Highlight, is discovering options for individuals in poor nations. In Africa, he says, South Africa and Egypt have probably the most radiotherapy assets. Nonetheless, ready instances in South Africa will be unacceptably excessive. In 2017, KwaZulu-Natal confronted a most cancers disaster that was detailed in a report by the South African Human Rights Fee earlier than Parliament that yr. In 2020, Each day Maverick reported that corruption round radiation machine upkeep, non-functioning machines, and a healthcare employees scarcity resulted in at the very least 499 preventable most cancers deaths within the province.
Mallum began working in Durban on the again of this disaster. He says: “Once I joined the College of KwaZulu-Natal again in 2020, simply pre-covid, there was a disaster of oncology in KwaZulu-Natal. So a affected person could be recognized as we speak, and their appointment for radiation remedy was occurring six months, or one yr later. And that may be a time bomb. Actually, you might be compromising their end result. As a result of most cancers would not sleep, daily, each hour, each minute, each second, most cancers cells replicate. Two turn into 4, 4 turn into eight, eight turns into 16. And by the point while you see this affected person, the most cancers has already thrown them again, that they aren’t even match for remedy.”
Mallum says that presently the province has seven state-of-the-art linear accelerator (linac) radiotherapy machines – which has capability to carry out hypofractionated radiation remedy. There are three at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital, two at Addington Hospital on Durban’s beachfront, and two at Greys Hospital in Pietermaritzburg. “They’re all lively and dealing, and there are plans to get extra,” he says.
What will be completed about individuals’s lengthy journeys to cities for radiation remedy? “So there’s a plan, what they name decentralising most cancers providers,” he says. “For instance, an oncology unit was created at Ngwelezana Hospital [in northern KwaZulu-Natal]. They’re giving chemotherapy, however there’s a plan that machines shall be established there, too.” Nevertheless, earlier this yr The Zululand Observer reported that expansions at Ngwelezana Hospital’s oncology unit have been delayed.
Again house
In the meantime, after shifting to South Africa, Mallum continued conferring with colleagues again house on the College of Maiduguri Instructing Hospital, the place he accomplished his preliminary medical diploma. “As I began at Stellenbosch College, we had crises again house, the Boko Haram incidents,” he says. Boko Haram is a gaggle that has been designated a terrorist organisation by the Nigerian authorities. The group has been accountable for an extended record of terrorist assaults claiming many lives.
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Regardless of huge destabilisation within the space, three years in the past a dream close to Mallum’s coronary heart got here true when an official scientific oncology division with two linac machines opened on the College of Maiduguri Instructing Hospital. He says: “Whereas I used to be doing the coaching at Stellenbosch, I used to be busy speaking with them again house, supporting them. In the present day as we converse, I’m not there bodily, however we had been capable of set up a most cancers centre. And so they have precisely the machines that we’ve got right here at [Inkosi] Albert Luthuli. They’ve two machines and the plan is to make it 4 machines, so it is coming, little by little.”
A toddler’s imaginative and prescient
Drugs first struck a way of awe in Mallum, when, as a younger baby, a pharmacy assistant handled his grandmother who had collapsed in agony after being stung by a scorpion.
“All night time she was crying and I used to be crying, as a result of she’s my grandma and she or he was in ache. After which the pharmacy assistant got here and gave my grandma a neighborhood infiltration injection (a numbing drugs). Every thing bought higher and at last she slept, it was similar to magic. So then I stated: ‘Lord, I actually wish to be a kind of individuals, somebody that may assist the neighborhood’.”
That early imaginative and prescient has led him internationally. In the present day, Mallum is an adjunct professor of world oncology and public well being at Walter Sisulu College in Mthatha, and an affiliate professor of radiation drugs and scientific oncology on the College of KwaZulu-Natal. He’s additionally a former analysis fellow at Johns Hopkins College in america. Going ahead, he plans to steer scientific trials on implementing hypofractionated radiotherapy as a regular of care throughout Africa.
Chatting with Highlight, Mallum says: “Illness is just not solely cured by drugs. It has a psychological half. It has a religious half. So I imagine that simply treating sufferers however with out ardour, you might be nonetheless missing. I see a form of alternative in my means of approaching sufferers. I create time to take heed to them. If I’m able to make one affected person smile, I really feel glad internally and people issues encourage me.”
On the College of KwaZulu-Natal, extra PhD college students in radiotherapy and oncology are anticipated to observe in his footsteps. He says he anticipates co-supervising at the very least two, quickly.
Mallum lives in Musgrave in Durban along with his spouse and their two sons.
